The Last Worthless Evening (3 page)

Again Willie laughed, even as the waitress appeared suddenly out of the dark and noise, and he reached back for his wallet, doubling forward with that motion and his laughter too, and gave her some yen and shook his head and held his hand up to refuse the change and she thanked him in Japanese—I can't spell the word; its sound is
arrigato
—then he stopped laughing and drew on his cigarette but he laughed again as he inhaled, then he coughed. I was laughing and he waved a hand at me to stop so he could clear his throat and breathe, but I couldn't stop, for still I was seeing that Darwinian monkey on the dusty gravel road, in the hot afternoon of summer, shaking his head, bewildered and sad. Willie coughed again, breathed clearly a couple of times, swallowed some beer; and then, as though he saw too what I did—that puzzled and doleful monkey—he was laughing.

There is something about true laughter. Or at least about laughter whose source is not really comic. Like yesterday at sea—I was going to get to this but I can't stop writing about being ashore with Willie—when we were firing live rounds with VT fuses from the five-inch fifty-four gun mount, and during the firing exercise the magazine jammed and the sailors in my gun crew had to unload it by hand, carrying one shell at a time, cradled in their arms and held against their chests, having to carry the round to the turret's hatch and hand it to a sailor waiting at the top of the gun mount's ladder, then that sailor had to back down the short but vertical ladder and carry the round across the small deck, then down and down the series of angled ladders going below decks, where he could at last hand it to someone else to store. The danger of this is dropping it. The VT fuse at the head of the round is a variable time fuse, meaning once the round is fired from the gun the fuse is activated and will explode not on contact but when it approaches something—fifty feet away, thirty feet, whatever, depending on the fuse's setting. I was of course frightened, as the sailors were, and I stayed with them, so if a sailor dropped a round and set the fuse into action and it exploded he'd at least know his officer's meat and bones would join his on the bulkheads of the turret, which had always seemed comfortably large, with enough space for men to move about in, but as each sailor removed a round and carried it to the man on the ladder, our place seemed smaller and smaller, just enough to contain all the force of an explosion and what was left of the two men who before the sound and flash had been standing, breathing, speaking.

Do not think of me as brave. It was simply required. Besides, there was a detachment about my fear. I was watching myself doing my work as it ought to be done, and I concentrated more on that than on images of my body in flung pieces, and never seeing you again, or the sea and the sun, and all else that I love. Then a sailor, a seaman by rank, a lanky and gentle man from Idaho named Mattingly, dropped a round. He had just removed it from the gun's magazine, had turned toward me to pass me and hand it to the sailor on the ladder. It simply fell, as though his arms decided to uncurl from its weight. It struck the steel deck and slid perhaps a foot between us, then stopped. Its fuse was bent at nearly a forty-five-degree angle. It had hit the deck loudly, and there was the sound of its slide, then Mattingly and I looked at each other in a moment of new and absolute silence, though outside the turret, now that the firing exercise was over, planes were catapulting from the flight deck. Mattingly's face was pale, like that of a man who without warning is about to vomit. Probably mine was too. I know my mouth had opened, as Mattingly's had. Then he bent for the round, and I spoke before I knew that I could.

“Don't touch it,” I said.

We watched it. Then I turned to the sailor on the ladder, only his head and shoulders appearing above the hatch. The sun was on his face, but his flesh was pale too, as though he had been in the engine room for months.

“Get off the ladder,” I said. “Take the other men off the deck. Then lock the hatch behind you. Don't let anyone out here. Wait. Except Ensign Stark. You know him? The EOD officer?” The sailor nodded. “And his chief. He'll probably bring his chief. But nobody else. Do you understand? Mattingly's going with you too.”

“Mr. Fontenot,” Mattingly said.

“Go on.”

“I'm the one dropped it.”

“Go on, Mattingly.”

“Yes sir.”

There was not relief in his voice; or fear either; or any tone that implied hurry. He spoke like a man obeying someone at a funeral. Then he was gone, and on the phone at the bulkhead I dialed Stark's number and told him.

“You said
VT
?”

“Yes.”

“And it's bent? The fuse? Where are you?”

“Standing here looking at it.”

“We're on the way. And you get out of there.”

“I want to make sure it doesn't move.”

“On this big fucking ship? A grocery cart wouldn't move. I'm there,” and he hung up.

He and his chief came with a manual. Stark was first up the ladder, the color still in his face (and I hoped mine was restored, if in fact it had left), and in one hand he was holding the book. His starched khakis were crumpled. He stood looking at our companion on the deck, at its bent fuse. He pushed up the visor of his cap, and blond curls showed at his forehead. Everett Stark is twenty-two years old, married just before we sailed, and he is my drinking friend. He is a cheerful drinker and is the ship's explosive ordinance disposal officer and also our diver, scuba and deep-sea. His chief stood beside him, a dark wiry man nearing forty. He had a tool kit with him; he nodded at me once, and looked at the round. We could have been standing over a corpse, not of a friend, but of a man we had all known. Stark said: “Did you call the
OOD
?”

“Yes.”

“What did he say?”

“To keep him informed.”

“Should have told him just to keep his ears open. He'd be the first to know.”

The chief took off his khaki cap, tossed it to the deck, and said: “The fourth.” Then he kneeled beside the round and, with one finger, touched it. “At least it ain't a fucking misfire,” he said. “Fucker's cold as my old lady.”

Stark grinned and kneeled beside him.

“Good thing it's not as hot as mine.”

“Mr. Stark's a bridegroom,” the chief said, looking at the fuse while Stark read the table of contents of his manual.

“I know,” I said.

“You can go,” Stark said. “In case you need to call the
OOD
.”

“In case he can't hear a big bang,” the chief said.

“So you can write the report.”

“In triplicate,” the chief said.

“I'll stay.”

Stark shrugged. “What the fuck. It won't be the first last call we've had.”

“Mr. Stark,” the chief said. “Is that book talking to you yet?”

“Not yet.”

I did move toward the hatch, close enough to be blown up, far enough to feel that at least I wasn't as close as they were, at least I wasn't touching it.

“Here it is,” Stark said. “Want to hear it?”

“I can't understand that shit. Just read it to yourself and tell me what it says. If you don't mind.”

Stark read, then talked to the chief, his voice low until he finished; then he laughed and slapped the chief on the shoulder.

“I think it says be careful,” he said.

“Seems to be the message. Maybe Mr. Fontenot could call the OOD, inform him we're being careful. In accordance with the manual.”

I wanted to. Because it had become bizarre. Only a few feet outside the hatch was the sea, and I wanted to pick up the round and go down the ladder and to the rail and drop it into the Pacific. But Stark and the chief had to know whether the fuse had been activated and was ready to explode as soon as it looked at something, and for some reason had simply chosen not to yet, but might at any time: as it was carried past a bulkhead, or through a hatch. They worked quietly. They murmured to each other, passed and received screwdrivers and pliers, finally spoke hardly at all:
Okay
, they said, or
That's that
, and once Stark picked up the open manual and looked at a diagram and showed it to the chief who nodded and leaned over again with his screwdriver. There was such concentration in their faces that it seemed their bodies existed only to keep their faces alive. And their hands, their fingers. Then the fuse was off, resting bent in the chief's hand, looking as lethal still as it had on the round. Then at once Stark and the chief started laughing. I watched them. Then I smiled.

“Gerry,” Stark said, between his laughter. “Call the
OOD
.”

“Tell him,” the chief said, one hand on Stark's shoulder, the other rubbing the fuse, as a gold prospector might hold and fondle a nugget, “tell him we got him a paperweight.”

“To put under his cap,” Stark said.

“Inside his skull,” the chief said. “Give him something to roll around in there.”

Together they stood, arms about each other's shoulders, laughing as though indeed they had drunk that lethal and lovely last call that would send them singing into the streets, howling at the moon, ready for fighting, lovemaking, or a bottle to share sitting on a curb. They even moved drunkenly to the hatch, and the chief leaned out of it and, sidearm, threw the fuse over the rail, into the sea. Then he released Stark and went backward down the ladder, smiling, shaking his head, then laughing again as he stopped midway and reached his hands through the hatch.

“Here you go, Mr. Stark.”

Stark brought the round to the hatch and lowered it into the chief's hands. He backed down the ladder, went to the rail, looked at the water, then up at us standing at the hatch.

“You gentlemen want a forward pass or a drop kick?”

“Sissy stuff,” Stark said. “See if you can throw it off the starboard side.”

The chief looked up at the edge of the flight deck above the gun mount.

“I don't know. I'd have to clear the flight deck. And miss the bridge or go over it. Fuck it.”

His back was to the sea. He bent his knees, then straightened them, and with both arms threw the round over his head, his straining face, and spun to watch it splash and sink.

“Beautiful,” Stark said.

“Mr. Stark? Would you bring my cap down with you?” He put a cigarette between his lips, patted the pockets of his khaki shirt. “And your lighter. And that funny little manual. What's this gun? Mount eight?”

I nodded.

“Mr. Stark, don't accept no more calls from this mount.”

“Hazardous duty pay, Chief.”

“They never said you had to
be
hazardous. And read a fucking manual that
tells
you you're hazardous.”

Stark turned from the hatch and picked up the chief's cap and the manual. He was grinning again, and he called out to the chief: “Don't you want the tools?”

“Shit,” the chief said. “Might's well leave them. We'll probably be back.”

Stark took the tool kit and at the hatch he patted my shoulder with the cap and manual.

“Great guy,” he said, “the chief. You can inform the OOD that the motherfucker is defused and at the bottom. See you at chow.”

He stepped onto the ladder, and the chief came and took the kit and cap and manual from him so Stark could use both hands going down. I phoned the OOD, watching Stark and the chief smoking at the rail, the chief holding the manual before them, and they were looking at it and smiling, talking, sometimes laughing again, like two men looking at a photograph someone had taken of them in an instant of drunken foolishness.

That was going to be a separate letter, but Willie and I laughing so long at the joke, the monkey on the road, reminded me of it. For our laughter did not spring from the recognition of anything funny. No more than Stark's and his chief's did, as they laughed at the manual and their having to use it not only to do their jobs, but to save their lives. And mine too, but I was excluded from their mirth because I had merely chosen to watch, while they had done the work they had learned to do but probably had forgotten, because neither of them expected ever to handle a VT fuse that might be activated, because an activated VT fuse was supposed to be the nose of a round already propelled high into the air, well beyond their responsibilities, their lives.

Willie and I laughed at another death: not one that comes in an explosion's instant, but a minute-by-minute, day-by-day-for-centuries death of health, justice, and hope for an entire race of Americans, and the lesser—because the suffering is less, even imperceptible—death of the white race as well. If one believes, as you and I do and as Willie does, that you cannot perpetrate or even tolerate or even close your eyes to evil without paying a price.

Later, as we drank what we called our last beer, he said: “When I get out of the Navy, I'm going to be Jason.”

“Won't it feel strange? After—what, twenty-five years?”

“It's my middle name.”

“I know. But most of the time I don't even remember I have one.”

“What is it?”

“Francis. For Francis of Assisi. My mother's favorite saint.”

“Was he the rich guy who gave it all up?”

“That's him.”

“Want to give up some yen for a beer? I've run out.”

“Might as well. We'll be fucked up tomorrow anyway.”

I raised my hand into the noises of louder, drunker voices, and the dark and smoke that seemed to hover over our booth like something my fingers could touch and penetrate.

“I'm tired of being Willie,” he said.

I waited for words. Then she was there, so small that her throat and chin were level with my vision. I ordered the Asahis; and in that pause, that turning away from Willie, I was relieved, grateful, for suddenly I knew the words that I had nearly spoken, and would have spoken had I drunk gin instead of beer, or perhaps even three more beers. I had nearly said to him: There's always Willie Mays. I had beer left in my glass, and I drank it before looking at him. Then I said: “I like it. Jason Brooks. Has style. Goes better with your boy's name too, Jimmy. Jason and James and Louisa.”